Reflecting on Thoreau

Have you noticed how many of us live with a mobile device nestled into the palm of our hand. Eyes glued to the cathode screen anticipating a text, ears tuned into a video or fingers scrolling down through social media posts, as we become curious voyeurs. While science and technology have led to discoveries in medicine, propelled us into space and to the depths of the oceans, the machines that are the byproducts of these discoveries often insulate us from nature.

This year is the bicentennial birthday of Henry David Thoreau, born in Concord, Massachusetts on 12 July 1817. Thoreau, the dissenter, jailed for one night for avoiding taxes and a “hermit” who inhabited a cabin on Walden Pond and published the classic book, Walden. Or so the myth.

Laura Dassow Wall’s extensively researched and beautifully written new biography, Henry David Thoreau, A Life (University of Chicago Press, 2017) provides us with insights into the many contradictions of his life. The Morgan Library in New York is currently featuring an exhibition entitled “This Ever-New Self: Thoreau and His Journal” on view through September 10th, when it moves to the Concord Museum in Concord, Massachusetts. At the Morgan one can read Thoreau’s journals in his own hand and imagine him sitting at his small green writing desk, which is on loan from the Concord Museum. There is an online exhibition on the Morgan website entitled: Thoreau’s Journal: A Life of Listening one can read or listen to.
Many of the questions that have divided our nation, the role of government, race relations, religion and education, were questions of concern to Thoreau. We were, he believed, so entrenched in the complexities of the unnatural world we forgot how to engage with the natural world. Thoreau encouraged “stopping” in the words of Laura Dassow Walls to “still the mind, open the body, clear the senses. Thoreau called this listening, beyond the sound itself: ‘I was always conscious of sounds in nature which my ears could never hear – that I caught but the prelude to a strain.’” Thoreau’s belief was to be at one with nature.

Thoreau is of particulate interest to me because I am in New Hampshire for the month of August living in a cottage not unlike his cabin on Walden Pond. With limited technology, a shelf of books, and three chairs (“one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society” Walden), I am living in nature as I cannot in Manhattan. Listening to the wind whispering through the trees, walking past patches of ferns noticing the variety and subtle shades of green, beginning to identify the songs of the birds.

The evening before leaving New York I attended a screening of “Detroit”, Katheryn Bigelow’s film that casts a lens on an event at the Algiers Hotel during the riots that tore Detroit apart during the summer of 1967. The film forces us to think about violence and racism head on.

I left the theater feeling drained and walked for several blocks engulfed in the black heat, humidity and noise of the City. Thoreau, I kept thinking. If there is a way back from violence, anger and distrust perhaps it can be found through the diversity, chaos and wonder that exist harmoniously in the natural world.